eve that the one main thing
which you miss in Churchill is the true poetical touch and temper of the
spirit. He is, as far as he succeeds, a sort of inferior Junius in
verse--sinewy, keen--with a good, ready use of strong, plain English; but
he has no rapture. His fire is volcanic, not solar. Yet no light praise it
is, that he rejects frivolous ornament, and trusts to the strength of the
thought, and of the good or ill within. But besides the disparity--which
is great--of strength, of intellectual rank--this draws an insuperable
difference in kind between him and Pope or Dryden, that they are
essentially poets. The gift of song is on their lips. If they turn
Satirists, they bring the power to another than its wonted and native
vocation. But Churchill obtains the power only in satirizing. As Iago
says--

"For I am nothing if not critical."

Is this merely a repetition of Juvenal's "_facit indignatio versus_,"
rendered in prose, "Indignation makes _me_ a poet," who am not a poet by
nature? In the first place, Juvenal prodigiously transcends Churchill in
intellectual strength; and in the second, Juvenal has far more of
essential poetry, although hidden in just vituperation, and in the imposed
worldliness of his matter. But we must pull up.

The so-called "EPISTLE TO HOGARTH" is, after the wont of Churchill, a
shapeless, undigested performance. It is nothing in the likeness of an
epistle; but for three hundred lines a wandering, lumbering rhapsody,
addressed to nobody, which, after abusing right and left, suddenly turns
to Hogarth, whom it introduces by summoning him to stand forth at the bar
in the Court of Conscience, an exemplar of iniquities worse than could
have been believed of humanity, were he not there to sustain the
character, and authenticate the rightful delineation. Thenceforwards
obstreperously railing on, overwhelming the great painter with exaggerated
reproaches for envy that persecuted all worth, for untired self-laudation,
for painting his unfortunate _Sigismunda_; and oh! shame of song! for the
advancing infirmities of old age. The merits of Hogarth, as master of
comic painting, are acknowledged in lines that have been often quoted, and
are of very moderate merit--not worth a rush. "The description of his age
and infirmities," as Garrick said at the time, "is too shocking and
barbarous." It nauseates the soul; and unmasks in the Satirist the
rancorous and malignant hostility which assumes the disguise